The Impossible Layout of THE SHINING’s Overlook Hotel - Kubrick Wanted To Mess With Your Head

Happy birthday, Stanley Kubrick. In celebration of the master’s birth, let’s watch this kind of amazing video breakdown of the geography of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining - which, it turns out, is spatially impossible. At first I was thinking that this video was simply nitpicking at some design choices made on sets that weren’t intended to be fully functional (they didn’t build a full hotel, after all), but as it goes on it becomes more and more obvious that Kubrick was establishing impossible spaces. This becomes really apparent when exploring the halls around Room 237 and the kitchen storage spaces. It was purposeful design, created to make no sense, to be illusory and dreamlike. It’s amazing!

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